Who is RedditGifts Anyway?

After last Christmas I was pretty sure that I wanted to do this again but gave myself a month or so to really figure that out. It was a ton of stress and pressure last Christmas, but after talking to 5days (who is my wife if you didn't know), we decided that we thought that knowing what we now know, we could do it again and manage the stress better.

After deciding that, it was really down to me to figure out what needed to be done to the site in order to have it run again. This might not seem like a big deal, but last year the whole site was built in a few weeks and most of it I was on vacation visiting my parents … sick too! Needless to say, I made some technical decisions that just weren't going to fly if I was going to continue on with this.

I knew at this point that I wanted to have this mid-year christmas thing and that doing it more than that would be too much, so I knew I had about 4 months or a bit less to get everything together. This actually isn't very much time when all you have is a few hours a week to work on it.

I'd like it if everyone would throw down a big welcome to tinio here. He is a serious reddit lurker and I don't know if there's anything I can do to change that, but I have been working with him for years now and he is extremely trustworthy and more importantly (or maybe relevant), he is super fucking smart. A few months back now I came to tinio and asked him if he'd be interested in running redditgifts with me, at least from the code perspective. After a bit of persuading, he agreed, and there was much rejoicing. We had many-a-meeting at mexican restaurants talking about different things we needed to do and different ways of approaching them. For the last 6 weeks neither tinio, nor I have had a weekend off, and this is something that I feel was completely worth it, 'cause you know, arbitrary day and all. So, yeah … welcome tinio, follow him on twitter or something.

And then Arbitrary Day Was Born

While going through this development process I also approached licenseplate and asked if she would be interested in running redditgifts with tinio and myself. She agreed and seriously, I was giddy. Licenseplate is so-freaking-amazing it is insane. If you like the new look of redditgifts, this is in large part due to licenseplate. She did all of the images on the site. She also designed the arbitrary day poster which, really, I hope people will buy. She printed and paid for a bunch of these things to be printed and could really use some people buying them :)

So, if you were to draw some kind of chart describing who runs RedditGifts it would go something like:

And we are all now totally rich from it! Just kidding, i've made a total of $5 from the ads in 3 months

Last but not least, if you have been to RedditGifts you have surely been touched by the prose of gingererg! I emailed here just a few weeks ago asking if she'd be down to write the new stuff for arbitrary day and sure enough … a few weeks later she delivered!

That is just the start of this whole thing tho, we are the people who like, make servers run and make shit pretty but, if this secretsanta community wasn't here … there is just no way this would happen. I seriously have zero time right now to be spending on this, so every answer someone posts, every link someone makes, every suggestion, every email is so appreciated you don't even know. We have bigger plans for RedditGifts, all of which we are confident you will all be into, we just need time, like a few months.

Oh, we mustn't forget … We were lucky enough to have a ton of dedicated testers this time around (seriously, who has a qa team this big!). They were able to help over the course of three days and reported a ton of bugs. I seem to not have everyone's reddit username and don't want to put peoples emails, so if you tested and aren't on this list but want to be, please let me know!

I have to say a big thanks to the reddit staff! They have been very helpful, they provide us with a server, they provide us with advertising … it is great. Thank you guys, i'll send you some birthday cake soap any day now!